“Since everything is but an apparition, perfect in being what it is, having nothing to do with good or bad, acceptance or rejection, one may well burst out in laughter.”

—Long Chen Pa, “The Natural Freedom of Mind”

For the past several years I have been co-leading “humor and wisdom” workshops with my friend Paul Krassner, editor of The Realist magazine and a standup satirist who sometimes calls himself “the Zen Bastard.” Our workshops are advertised as a way to “find your comic perspective,” and we have played the major venues such as Esalen and Omega Institute. In the workshops we discover the laughter in life, death, relationships, culture, religion and politics; we review audio and video tapes of the great comedians, keep humor journals and play theater games focusing on the different aspects of the human comedy. Humor is currently a big hit on the human potential circuit and may some day replace “breath work” as a more entertaining way to hyperventilate. Here are some pieces from my workshop notebook selected especially for readers of the Inquiring Mind.

But Seriously, Folks . . .

“What a fine comedy this world would be if one did not play a part in it!” —Diderot

 THE COSMIC AND THE COMIC ARE ONE. And the joke’s on you. Say amen and ha ha! Even the path is the same. In order to develop either a cosmic or a comic perspective requires that we step back and get some distance on our own little drama, to become not only actors on the stage of the world but audience as well. The trick is to be able to see our own persona (person) as the mask that it is, the archetype that we are typecast to portray; then to view the production we are in as the “play,” most often a parody, and at its best, a musical comedy. What we seek is a way to relieve the great seriousness with which we take ourselves. To be enlightened is to “lighten up.”

One technique we use in our workshops is very similar to the process used in meditation to help people develop a cosmic perspective. We begin to train a part of our mind to be an observer, sometimes called “the other,” or the higher self, to just watch what is going on from a distance. In developing the comic perspective we simply give the observer a sense of humor! Why have a grim higher self? You might as well put a wry smile on the face of your observer, and then let it look at life and the world with a curious sense of wonder and bemusement. As Wavy Gravy says, “If you don’t have a sense of humor, it’s just not funny.”

And we are funny, we humans. Not necessarily funny to make you laugh out loud, but almost always odd or strange. Mostly we are funny because we do take ourselves so seriously, like the sophisticated gentleman in the top hat about to slip on a banana peel. Somehow we get the idea that we are very important in the universe. Furthermore we believe that we control our own destinies. These delusions make us thrash about and behave in the most bizarre ways. As a general rule of the opposable thumb, the extent to which things are funny depends on the distance you can get on your life and times. Can you step out of your body, out of your mind, out of your culture and beliefs, out of human history, off the planet? How far out can you get? Let’s see . . . .

Who’s On First?

“The comic spirit masquerades in all things we do and say; we are each a joke and do not need to put on a white face.” —James Hillman

TAKE THE BODY. PLEASE. It is made up of 86 percent water. I call it “the sublime slime.” If we break it down further we find that the water is made up of hydrogen and oxygen atoms. However, according to the scientists, those hydrogen and oxygen atoms are almost nothing but empty space. Our bodies are made of unbelievably small particles that nobody can see, with vast distances of space between them! So what is holding our clothes on? Nothing. The world is a magic show, an illusionist’s trick, and we are all part of the act. You could say, “The clothes have no emperor!”

Now, for contrast, let’s leave the subatomic world and step way back for the big picture. Where are we located in the larger scheme of things? Just a few hundred years ago people believed that the earth was the center of the universe. Then Galileo and Copernicus figured out that the earth circled the sun and not vice versa, and therefore the sun was actually the center of the universe. The Catholic Church excommunicated Galileo for his heresy, and did not forgive him until 1979! By that time astronomers knew that the sun was a relatively small star located on the edge of a relatively small galaxy in a cosmos that Included millions of galaxies full of uncountable billions of stars. So now where is the center of the universe? And where does that leave us, the all­important residents of planet Earth? Your post-modern astronomer will also tell you that ever since the big bang, everything in the universe has been moving uniformly away from everything else in all directions, so that actually, every place in the universe is the center. That’s you, baby! You are still the center of the universe, just as you have always believed and hoped it would be.

Humor Journal Exercise: You are a journalist from another solar system on assignment to planet Earth, a place becoming well known in the cosmos for its strange creatures with their curious customs and beliefs. You pick one event or behavior or idea that you find fascinating or revealing, and write a short piece about it for your paper, the Light Year Times. For inspiration, here are a few quotations from two Earth reporters:

“This is a strange place, an extraordinary place, and interesting. . . . The people are all insane, the other animals are all insane, the earth is insane, Nature itself IS Insane.”

“Man is a marvelous curiosity . . . . he thinks he is the Creator’s pet. He prays to Him and thinks He listens . . . . Isn’t it a quaint idea?”

” … the human being, like the immortals, naturally places sexual intercourse far and away above all other joys—yet he has left it out of his heaven!”

” . . . he is constantly inflicted with a defect . . . the Moral Sense. It is the secret of his degradation. It is the quality which enables him to do wrong. Without it, man could do no wrong. He would rise at once to the level of the Higher Animals.”

—Mark Twain, from “Satan’s Letter” in Letters from the Earth

“If an alien were to hover a few hundred yards above the planet

It could be forgiven for thinking

That cars were the dominant life-form,

And that human beings were a kind of ambulatory fuel cell:

Injected when the car wished to move off

And ejected when they were spent.”

—Heathcote Williams from his epic poem Autogeddon

The Gods Must Be Crazy

“All great truths begin as blasphemies.” —George Bernard Shaw

 
One of the most frustrating things about this existence is that we can’t be sure what purpose it serves. The contemporary street wisdom says, “Life is a bitch and then you die.” Coupled to this aphorism should be the line, “And nobody knows the reason why.” Perhaps this existential absurdity is the greatest insult. We cannot bear the idea that there is nothing more to life than life. Our existence—our suffering—must have some greater meaning and if the universe won’t tell us what it is, then we will have to use our own imaginations! Hence we have the gods and the religions. This is not to say that these justifications for existence are not “real.” They are as real as we are! Furthermore, it is more likely that all belief systems are true than that only one of them is true. Every god and goddess helps to define us and to refine us and is therefore our “creator.” Each religion gives us ways to express our longings and offers us the solace of a “higher meaning.” And like ourselves, our gods and religions are not only profound, they are also often profoundly humorous.

Getting some distance on our own beliefs is one of the most difficult leaps of faith. However, in the past few centuries, as the world has shrunk, we have learned of the existence of a multitude of different gods and religions. These discoveries should shed some relativistic light on our own and on all belief systems. Can we now step back and, for a few minutes, walk the thin line between blasphemy and a healthy, humorous skepticism?

The Hundred Thousand Names of G-d

Either gods invented humans or we invented gods, and in either case, the invention has not been a great success. As the Hassids used to say, “If God lived on earth, people would break out all his windows.”

In the Judeo- Christian tradition, a god named Jehovah supposedly created the heavens and the earth and everything else in just seven days. In the Bible it says that God looked at His creation and “saw that it was good.” This could be the first use of irony ever recorded. For a more likely creation story, I go to the supreme being of a Bantu tribe in Africa, whose creator’s name is Bumba. In the beginning Bumba was alone except for darkness and water. Then suddenly he was smitten with agonizing stomach pains, and he spat out the sun, the moon and all living creatures. That’s better. The universe began as a stomach ache.

If I had been born in a certain region of South-West Africa, I would probably believe in the sky-god of the Herero people. The god’s name is Ndjambi and the name can only be spoken or written on special occasions. Hopefully, this was one of them.

Also, I’d like to mention a female supreme being, the ancient Chinese creator named Nu-gua, who formed the first human beings out of yellow clay, and who also invented the flute. She sounds like a rather soft, aesthetically pleasing deity who would be easy to get along with. I think I would much rather crawl into Her lap for a little Great-Mother nurturing, than beg mercy or await judgment from some male gods I have known.

So far lightning has not struck me or my computer, so let’s continue.
 
 

Crazy Wisdom and Fascinatin’ Rhythm

In nearly every major religion there is a crazy wisdom school, a bunch of jokers and misfits, musicians and magicians, who attempt to keep the game of belief honest. There are the Zen masters with their koans that are meant to drive you out of your mind. There was the Greek god Dionysos and his followers who partied down for salvation. There was even a medieval Catholic mass held just before Lent, when a donkey was led into the church. (Let us bray!) In the native American tribes there are tricksters like Coyote who express the lewd and the ludicrous nature of existence. There are the whirling dervish Sufis and the original Jewish Hassids who believe it is not so important to understand the Talmud or the Koran because God is reachable through singing and dancing. There is the black Southern Baptist hallelujah-wailing gospel congregation and the hypnotic ecstasy singing of the Krishna devotees. To steal from a political slogan, “If I can’t dance, I don’t want to be in your religion.”

Theater Game Exercise: Make up your own religion. Go ahead! Lots of other people have done it. But no martyrs, please. Just take one of your obsessions and give it symbol and voice. Find a fixation or desire and offer it the devotion it deserves. After all, isn’t it your “reason to be”? Create rituals and a liturgy and mantras around it. If you absolutely insist, then you can even give your religion a moral code.

Our workshops have produced several great cults, such as the followers of the MASTER CARD, or the Screenies, who worship the Reverend T.V. Screen. How about a religion based on worship of the answering machine? Believers keep calling up God, only to get His machine, where the message is always, “Sorry was not in when you called . . . but please leave your name and number and I’ll get back to you as soon as I can.” Yeah, sure.

Here are a few new religious organizations currently seeking tax-free status: The First Church of the Last Laugh. The Hahayana Buddhist Temple. Goyim for Jews for Jesus. Jews for Krishna (also known as Hind-Jews). The Born Again and Again and Again Buddhists.

While some of you may consider these groups to be just cults, remember that every major religion started out that way.

The Fool

“If the fool would persist in his folly he would become wise.” —William Blake

The Fool is the first card in the Tarot deck, the only character from the whole Tarot to make it into our modern playing cards. He is the joker and he is always wild, and almost always welcome. The Fool in the Tarot is smiling, wandering in the sunshine with his little dog, no particular place to go and not a care in the world. And. . . he is about to step off the edge of a cliff! Wavy Gravy says it’s alright because as he walks along, the cliff will grow more cliff. I like to believe that the Fool knows he is about to step off the cliff and he is still smiling.

Daily Exercise: You can develop the fool or the trickster in yourself. Just try playing with the world around you. It is a great amusement park, full of opportunities for fun. Do some of those wild and crazy things you have always wanted to do! Buy the bumper sticker, the rubber nose, the bubble blower. Write a letter to the editor. Play a practical joke on your mate or your guru. Enlighten up the world! Just remember Paul Krassner’s Golden Rule of Comedy: No Victims!

The Best of Times, The Worst of Times

“The people who live in a Golden Age usually go around complaining how yellow everything looks.” —Randall Jarrell

“The obscurest epoch is today.” —Robert Louis Stevenson

Stepping out of time is one of the best ways to work on your comic perspective. Like the fish that doesn’t notice the water, we rarely see how stuck we are in the worldview and fashions of our own age. To move back and forth in time can be a very liberating experience.

For example, consider your current life—the freedom, education, entertainments, foods, and the wealth of knowledge and opportunities available to you—and understand that only a few hundred years ago this was a lifestyle reserved only for kings and queens. On the other hand, if you had been born before Freud came along, you wouldn’t have had an ego problem.

We could go back fifteen billion years to the second before the big bang, when we were all packed together into one extremely dense little ball the size of your fist. The scientists say that everything was in that little ball, all matter that we know of from huge galaxies of stars to bicycles, executives, microbes, bathrobes, the mind of the Buddha, you and I, and all manner of other nameable and unnameable stuff. It was all jammed together into that tiny little ball. It was there that the concept of “needing your space,” must have originated!

Being aware of the era we live in can help relieve the burden of being who we are. For instance, in a moment of interspecies compassion, I was wondering about the insect that lives for only a day. What if it’s raining that day? Okay folks, now welcome to the late Twentieth Century! What a day to be alive—nuclear weapons, the breakdown of the family, eco-disasters, etc. etc. It’s no wonder we are all a little confused and lost. But you don’t have to blame yourself. Just try thinking of this historical time period as “God’s midlife crisis!” You just happen to be caught up in it. The same sentiment is expressed in an old Tibetan saying, “Roll all blames into One.”
 
 

The Here and Now

“How is the world ruled and how do wars start? Diplomats tell lies to journalists and then believe what they read.” —Karl Kraus

In our workshops we devote considerable time to current cultural and political humor. These days, however, it is very difficult for satire to keep up with reality. For anyone with a modicum of sanity it is often impossible to imagine things to be more absurd than they already are. Consider concepts like “overkill” or “weapons for peace,” or the policy of paying farmers not to grow food. Paul has a good “reality check,” a way to determine whether or not he is dreaming. If he sees something on the TV news that he can’t believe is really happening, he just waves his arms in the air and if he doesn’t start flying, then it’s not a dream. He started doing this when he saw a White House Christmas party where Mr. T dressed up as Santa Claus and Nancy Reagan sat on his lap.
 
 

Take My Mind. Please.

“Man’s great misfortune is that he has no organ, no kind of eyelid or brake, to mask or block a thought, or all thoughts, when he wants to.” —Valery

I’ve been thinking about thinking and think we think too much. Many meditators start meditating because they think they think too much. They want to practice “nonthinking” for awhile. All that thinking is so tiresome, and very often painful. Sometimes it feels like we are chained to the brain, locked into the prison of mind and given a life sentence—to suffer under a life of sentences. Our thoughts judge us and the punishment is to have more thoughts, forcing us into the future or the past or into fretting some issue or fantasy endlessly, playing tapes of talk and projecting images that repeat over and over again. What a tiresome thing, this thinking!

Perhaps this train of thought is getting too heavy. That just goes to show you where thinking will get you. At least it shows you where my thinking will get you, which “is maybe why I have such a bad attitude toward the subject and why I practice nonthinking. Take my mind. Please. But first, one more thought about thinking. Where do you think thinking has got us? Would we be here if we didn’t think or, to put it another way, would we be extinct if we didn’t think? Maybe we’d just be “ex-thinkt.” Ex­thinkt! Descartes didn’t think he’d be here if he didn’t think, because he thinks, he thinks, therefore he is! I personally think he should have said, “I think, therefore I think I am.” I think that may be more accurate.

See what I mean about thinking? Where does it ever get us, but here, thinking about thinking. And when you think about it, over the entire history of thinking is there ever any point at which thinking made any great difference to the happiness of humans? I don’t think so. Okay, so we figured out a few things, like growing food and making tools and building shelters. That’s fine. But figuring something out is not the same as thinking. Making great art is not the same as thinking either. What I am referring to is all that gratuitous mental activity that goes on automatically while we are eating, driving, working or going to the toilet. Then we are just chewing on the mental cud, repetitiously grinding up the words and images that we have ingested. Most of this habitual thinking is a waste of energy, an extraneous feedback loop in the nervous system that has about as much use as the appendix.

Finally, thinking as a pastime is highly overrated. Many of you who practice “nonthinking” will agree, because you know how much fun it is not to think. However, some people will criticize meditators for their practice of nonthinking. They call us “empty­-headed.” I say to them, “Right on! And don’t knock it if you haven’t tried it.

I really can’t think of a good way out of this, so I guess I’ll have to refer to a higher authority. How about the great satirist Jonathan Swift, who didn’t think much of thinking either. Here, in Gulliver’s Travels, he describes some strangely familiar creatures called the Laputians:

“Their heads were all reclined either to the right, or the left; one of their eyes turned inward, and the other directly up to the zenith. I observed here and there many in the habit of servants, with a blown bladder fastened like a flail to the end of a short stick, which they carried in their hands. In each bladder was a small quantity of dried peas or little pebbles. With these bladders they now and then hit the mouths and ears of those who stood near them, of which practice I could not then conceive the meaning; it seems, the minds of these people are so taken up with intense speculations, that they neither can speak, nor attend to the discourses of others, without being roused by some external sensation upon the organs of speech and hearing; for which reason, those persons who are able to afford it always keep a flapper in their family, as one of their domestics, whose job it is, when two or more persons are in company, gently to strike with his bladder the mouth of him who is to speak, and the right ear of him to whom the speaker addresseth himself”

Death

or

A funny thing happened to me on my way to the grave. . . .

“Death, where is thy sting-a-ling a-ling?” —Dorothy Parker

If life is a joke then death is the punch line. If life is a tragedy then death means the show is over and we can leave and go home. If we have many lives, as they believe in the East, then we must also have many deaths. So we might as well practice dying and get good at it. Furthermore, the sages say that by learning how to die you also finally learn how to live. However, here’s the catch. Those same sages will also tell you that once you know how to both live and die, that’s when you get to leave the rebirth wheel of life and death. In other words, just when you get it right, its all over! Oh well, that’s life.

Woody Allen says he is not afraid of dying, he just doesn’t want to be there when it happens. Wavy Gravy reminds us that death is Patrick Henry’s second choice. With his poetic eye, Jorge Louis Borges sees death as “infinity closing in.”

Perhaps the most tragic thing about death is our fear of it. Research finds that people who are medically resuscitated, who literally come back from death, don’t want to be back. They say It s very peaceful out there. And, as the Buddha said, “Peace is the greatest happiness.”

Death Poem of Japanese poet Kyoriku:

“Till now I thought

that death befell

the untalented alone.

If those with talent, too,

must die

surely they make

a better manure?”

 
Benjamin Franklin’s epitaph:

“The Body of B. Franklin, Printer,

Like the Cover of an Old Book,

Its Contents Torn Out And

Stripped of its Lettering and Gilding,

Lies Here

Food for Worms,

But the Work shall not be Lost

For it Will as He Believed

Appear Once More

In a New and more Elegant Edition

Revised and Corrected

By the Author.”

 
Contemplate on these things, just for fun:

1) The sun will explode in several billion years. Not even Shakespeare will survive.

2) You are having a hard time in your relationship, you just lost some money on the stock market, etc., etc. No matter how painful they are at the moment there is a good chance that in the future you will be able to look back on these problems and have no reaction at all. You might even be able to laugh about it all. As Paul Krassner says, “Why not have your retrospect in advance.” Steve Allen says, “Satire is tragedy plus time.” Some other anonymous wise person said, “Time heals all wounds. Either that or it eventually kills the patient.”

∞

From the Winter 1988 issue of Inquiring Mind (Vol. 4, No. 2)

Text © 1988–2022 by Wes Nisker